How CRM can improve SMB banking
Since this is so obvious, why have banks not acted already, especially when they know how crucial SMBs are to revenue and profitability? Quite simply, it's a matter of balancing the cost of service with the need to maintain margins. Dedicating individual Relationship Managers to SMB customers, educating staff about various businesses and replacing legacy CRM systems all cost money. But an effective CRM strategy can help banks tide over many resourcing obstacles and deliver a better experience to their SMB clients. Here are some practices to improve the servicing, satisfaction and retention of these customers:
Capture profile data in full - when a customer profile goes beyond KYC compliance to reflect the business' objectives, financial position, and banking preferences, it becomes a goldmine of insight for the bank and a platform for right-selling.
Add value to products and services - banks must set up in-house expert teams to analyse market trends and direct the creation of customised products and services tailored to serve the specific requirements of SMBs.
Improve sales and marketing focus - ideally, a specialist team of sales, relationship and marketing personnel must be assigned to manage SMB customers. Their efforts must be supported by a robust CRM system which delivers the right product knowledge over the right channel and targeted marketing activities such as customer education events, referral programs and viral marketing campaigns on social networks.
Offer one-stop service - popular service requests must be made available on self-service channels to improve customer convenience as well as reduce bank employees' burden of servicing routine transactions. The CRM system must share data across all channels so that users can move seamlessly between them, without having to provide the same information all over again. It should act 'intelligently' to route an SMB customer to the same servicing group every time, as far as possible, and enable the latter to access peers, superiors or databases for help during the course of a customer interaction.
I have authored an indepth paper which is available here. I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
